A great battle is being fought in the space of one square centimeter, which is occupied by the latest generation smart chips from Huawei and Apple.
The two small pieces house the same number of transistors: 6.9 billion. Such power serves to make the high-end mobiles of these tech giants more efficient and faster.
A tight ‘sprint’
Huawei moved part first, announcing at the end of August at the IFA in Berlin the Kirin 980 processor that is housed in the Huawei Mate 20 and Huawei Mate 20 Pro, presented in London on October 16.
Apple waited until September 12 to unveil its A12 Bionic chip, which is integrated into the iPhone XS and XS Max, although these hit stores on September 21.
A12 Bionic includes a six-core fusion architecture with two up to 15% faster performance cores, four 50% more efficient efficiency cores, up to 50% faster quad-core GPU, a powerful signal processor of image and video encoder, among other functionalities.
But it will have to compete with its powerful Asian rival: Kirin 980 has a double neural processing unit (NPU) that sublimates the artificial intelligence experience; provides image recognition capacity greater than the sum of two NPUs. Thus, the new chip of the Chinese firm recognizes up to 4,600 images per minute , 120% more than with the previous model.
Aces of efficiency
Apple says that its A12 Bionic can carry out up to 5 trillion operations per second , compared to 600,000 million offered by the previous chip.
For its part, Huawei says of its Kirin 980 that it has a capacity 1.6 times greater than the previous generation, the 970. And that its new 7 nanometer processor offers 20% more performance and a 40% improvement in efficiency.
